Savage Magic (13 page)

One might as well be dead, after all.

Maria does not look up as she enters the room. Carrying the book, Abigail sits down upon the chair.

‘What will you read to her?’ asks the matron. Abigail holds the book up to her, but the woman frowns, a big ugly grimace, and looks away, saying nothing. She cannot read, but cannot bring herself to say so. Abigail has seen Delilah’s short-handed way with the Brooke House inmates, so is surprised by feeling suddenly sorry for her. The book may have done her some good, after all.

Delilah fusses around Maria’s bed for a while, obviously waiting for Abigail to start to read, this being the only way she might be able to identify the book without asking directly, though it will be a great surprise if a woman who cannot read will recognise even this particular volume. But soon another attendant appears at the door and calls for her, and she leaves, glancing back at Abigail once with a sour warning not to fill this poor mad girl’s head with even more delusions.

Abigail waits for a little while, listening to the nurses disappearing down the corridor, looking at Maria as she does so. The girl is silent, her breathing regular. It occurs to Abigail that she might even be asleep. After some minutes, she opens the book to the title page.

‘
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. By Mary Wollstonecraft. Third Edition
.’

Still, Maria says nothing, but Abigail thinks she can detect a shift in her breathing, a new inflection suggesting attentiveness. She skips the dedication to M. Talleyrand-Perigord, late Bishop of Autun, and the Advertisement, and begins reading from the Introduction.

After considering the historic page, and viewing the living world with anxious solicitude, the most melancholy emotions of sorrowful indignation have depressed my spirits, and I have sighed when obliged to confess, that either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial.

She pauses after the long sentence, and before continuing asks:

‘Did she already read you this, Maria? The woman who comes in the night. Did she already read this?’

Maria lifts her head. Her face is beautiful yet ghastly, young yet old, mad yet quiet. Her blue eyes suggest both frenzy and a despairing attentiveness. Her nostrils flare; she is breathing heavily now, as if she had just run into this place wearing that awful strait waistcoat.

Abigail smiles at Maria before her head falls down again.

After a little while, Abigail continues to read.

WESTMINSTER

Graham walks down towards the Strand in the approaching twilight. He turns into Adam Street, pondering on the arrogance of developers as he goes, and then turns onto the Royal Terrace, its thirteen houses presenting their elegant windows to the scurrying river.

Suspended on the steep slope between the Strand and the Thames, on the river side of the Adam brothers’ great Adelphi development, it strikes Graham as appropriate that the building was finished with funds raised by a lottery. There is something showy and unlikely about the place, an element of the impossible about the design and situation, an impertinence in the way it blocks the old riverside processional of the Strand from its historical view of the Thames.

He pauses for a look at the river, hearing a buzz of diligent commerce from the arcaded warehouses beneath his feet, despite the late hour. Lighters and wherries fill the river’s surface, reminding him of the view from his friend John Harriott’s window at the River Police Office in Wapping. There, the vessels entering the new dock system and disgorging a world’s harvest are massive and slow-moving, mammoths of wood and cloth and rope. The boats on the Westminster river are smaller and cleaner, as if the Thames itself were refining goods as they head upstream, turning barrels into bottles and boxes into bags.

He turns and walks along the terrace towards number thirteen, remembering suddenly that Dr Thomas Monro, the owner of Brooke House, resides behind one of these doors. Before he can ponder on which door Monro can be found behind he is accosted, loudly, by an old street woman whom he takes, on closer inspection than he would like, to be a gypsy.

‘Fortunes told, noble sir! Fortunes told! I shall consult the Dreaming for you, sir, if you so please! Or perhaps the Tarot? Or a little love magic? Though one so well set-up as thee surely requires no such assistance?’

She coughs and laughs and wheezes, performing as if on the stage. She is quite the most charismatic street woman Graham has ever come across and, as is his way, he finds himself delighted by her. She is a repulsive thing, of course, her face disfigured by a terrible scar, her black hair tumbling down across her filthy head, her dress torn but still artfully made.

‘Are there rich pickings for you hereabouts, woman?’ he asks. She chuckles meaningfully.

‘Richer than you’d ever think, fine sir, richer than you’d think. These houses contain clever gentlemen and willing women, as you know – but there’s a good many people within who believe in the power of my people.’

‘Indeed so? Servants, I take it?’

‘Servants is people, sir.’

‘And women, of course. Women are credulous of these things.’

There is something about this gypsy which makes Graham talk to her as if they were in on a shared joke, one at the expense of the maids and cooks within the houses behind them. She seems intelligent and speaks to him as an equal, not a potential client. This makes him uncomfortable, suddenly.

‘Women sees things, sir. Women sees a great many things.’

‘Well, now, be away with you. You’ll be telling me this ground is a fairy graveyard before long, and I should return with money to talk to them.’

‘No fairies at all, fine sir. None around here. But horrible large numbers of devils.’

And with that she walks away, chuckling to herself. Graham thinks of his wife and her superstitions, and finds himself considering the gullibility of females. He turns back to the house of Sir John Cope.

All thirteen houses on the Royal Terrace are identical. Their tall, elegant windows reflect the fading yellow light back on itself, creating an impassive secrecy. The houses remind Graham strongly of Wapping Pier Head where Harriott lives and, just now, recuperates. He is somewhat exercised by thoughts of Wapping today.

Thirteen black doors gleam with identical paint, their maintenance presumably enforced by some complex property regulation. Number thirteen is different to the dozen other houses for only one reason. Its curtains are closed to the world, on every floor.

Graham knocks on the door, and waits. A moment or two later, the door opens, and he is shown in to a wonderland.

The exterior of number thirteen may be austere and in keeping, but the interior is an impertinent phantasmagoria of colours and textures. The hall is lined with rugs and hangings such that every sound is swallowed up by densities of wool and cotton and silk. Where most English gentlemen would line their walls with portraits Sir John has opted for pure decoration, a riot of colour, purples peeking out from behind reds, blues muttering at greens, shrieking oranges and yellows which announce themselves so directly that one expects them to detach themselves from the wall and take wing. It is less an English gentleman’s house than a Caliph’s tent.

From somewhere inside the house, music is playing. A piano, tinkling as if from behind a waterfall in a Chinese valley.

The place looks, it occurs to Graham, like a magnificent bordello.

He presents his card and is shown into the drawing room, off the vestibule. The room’s effects are more muted than the hallway, but only by comparison. Patterned rugs festoon the chairs in the room, and the bookshelves glitter with painted spines, like expensive courtesans standing in London clubs. The smell in here is almost overpowering – a thick, potent combination of tobacco smoke, spices and something else, an intoxicating vapour which for a moment makes Graham’s head spin. He thinks about the young men he has seen taking the
hookha
at the Hindostanee Coffee House.

He ponders sitting down, but looking at the furniture he worries about doing so, lest he be sucked down into it. As in Wodehouse’s drawing room, he ponders the art on Cope’s ostentatious walls. One painting in particular is deeply familiar: a copy of Hogarth’s famous depiction of wicked old Sir Francis Dashwood, who is turned into a parodied St Francis of Assisi, gazing not upon a bible but on an erotic novel, the
Elegantiae Latini sermonis
edition of
Satyra Sotadica
. From his halo peeps the wicked old face of Lord Sandwich. And lying on his palm is the wanton figure of a naked woman.

The picture still has the power to appal. Graham is amazed at himself, and at his recall of the details of the picture. Such is the hold of Dashwood and his acolytes on the English imagination, even at a distance of a half-century. And is Royal Terrace really the headquarters of a new society of Medmenhamites, modern acolytes of Sir Francis Dashwood’s legendary band of hedonists? Has Dashwood’s Cistercian monastery by the banks of the upper Thames been transplanted here, to this elegant terrace by the same river? Graham has no illusions as to the appetites of society gentlemen, having witnessed them firsthand on too many occasions.

And then Sir John arrives.

He is wearing a dressing gown and slippers, of a piece with the rampant opulence of his house. The dressing gown is fashioned with stars and comets streaking through a purple-blue Void, and his slippers curl up at the toes as if eating themselves. On his head is a cap, the point of which leans over his eyes. He is a fat man with a young face, hooded eyes which flutter with exhaustion and a thick, sensuous mouth which puffs, intermittently, on a pipe as big as a baby’s arm.

‘What is it?’ he asks, in a quiet whisper. He does not offer Graham a seat.

‘Sir John Cope, I take it.’

‘You take it, yes. What do you want from me?’

‘You have not heard?’

‘Heard what?’

‘Heard of the fate of your friend Wodehouse.’

The man frowns through his pipe smoke and sits in one of the chairs. Graham, considering it unlikely that he is ever going to be invited, sits down anyway. Cope does not seem to notice.

‘I have heard nothing of Wodehouse,’ he says.

‘He is dead, Sir John. Murdered in his bedchamber.’

‘Dead?’

‘He is an acquaintance of yours, is he not? A fellow member of the Sybarites?’

Even under the effete exhaustion of those hooded eyes, Graham can see he has struck home. Cope holds the pipe in his hand and his voluptuous mouth hangs stupidly open. Graham is beginning to feel an impatient anger.

‘Before you say anything, Sir John, I should say that I have information that connects the deceased Sir Edmund Wodehouse with a society called the Sybarites. Wodehouse was found wearing the mask of a satyr. I understand that members of the Sybarites wear such masks at their evenings. The pursuit of pleasure is the primary purpose of these gatherings. Am I correct? Wine and, perhaps more pertinently, women. London’s nymphs, pursued by a group of hedonistic men. Sir Henry Tempest is another member. Is he not?’

It is a calculated risk, playing his cards so very early in the rubber. But Graham can see that Cope is intoxicated in some way – or at least very profoundly hung over – and a man in such a state cannot play games. He must push Cope into revealing something.

‘There is no . . .
law
. . . against parties.’ Spoken slowly and carefully. Graham begins to see there is no mystery to Cope’s demeanour. The man is, to put it simply, drunk.

‘No, Sir John, there is not. But whoever killed Sir Edmund meant it to be known he was a member of the Sybarites. Why would he do such a thing?’

Cope looks at the pipe in his hand as if seeing it for the first time. Graham decides enough is enough.

‘Call your manservant, Cope. Maybe I’ll get some more sense from him.’

Cope’s manservant is austere, alert and sanguine – everything his employer is not. He is also, notes Graham, deliberately and almost defiantly close-mouthed. If Cope’s reputation is anything like Graham has heard, he would need a reliable and discreet man to look after him. Discretion clothes this man as neatly as his well-pressed coat.

The servant stands in the drawing room, his back to the fireplace, his hands clasped in front of his stomach, looking at Graham with the neutral half-smile of a curate. Nothing perturbs him. He doesn’t once look at his employer.

‘Now, sir, my name is Aaron Graham. I am a magistrate at Bow Street.’

‘Indeed, such is as I understood from your card, sir.’

‘And your name?’

‘Burgess, sir.’

‘Well, as I have been saying to Sir John here, there has been a terrible slaughter. A man called Sir Edmund Wodehouse is dead.’

‘Indeed, sir.’

‘Do you know of this man?’

‘Yes, sir, I know of him.’

‘Has he attended parties at this house?’

‘Parties, sir?’

‘Yes, parties, Burgess. Gatherings of people for the pursuit of pleasure.’